the 200ok weblog

barcampsydney3

BarCampSydney is coming up again! BarCampSydney3 will be on 5th and 6th April (Saturday and Sunday) at the Roundhouse at UNSW Kensington.

If you haven't BarCamped before, it's a freeform conference. The agenda, speaker list etc is all decided on the fly by the people who are there on the day. It's inspiring, it's fun, it can be a pretty intense day of ideas and discussion. In short, it's geek heaven.

It has nothing to do with bars, although it does usually end up in the pub.

If you're planning to go, head on over to the BarCampSydney3 signup page. Note that the wiki password is at the bottom of the login page, if you get prompted.

The idea of maintaining and including multiple rendering engines still isn't ideal, but really it's not a bad compromise. My biggest objection was the default behaviour, so I'm really happy to see this turn of events.

Do I think it shows MS to be a good member of the standards community from here on out? Oh hell no. I really wouldn't be surprised if this is a random act rather than a new habit. Microsoft, as a corporate entity, has no real interest in standards - otherwise it'd get MS Office to support ODF, rather than trying to get open source projects to adopt .doc (just as a for instance). Much of its profit relies on (or benefits from) leveraging its monopolies to turn their proprietary solutions into "standards".

Of course I'd love to be proved wrong here. It'd be great if MS did embrace standards, open formats and so on. But on that, only time and actions will tell.

In the meantime, we can certainly give MS credit for taking the pain away from people who do the right thing. Only people who have a site that actually breaks in IE8 need implement the X-UA-Compatible fix. For them, the investment of time is entirely reasonable; since they have a real reason to do it.

IE8 can now be a step forward for standards, instead of the huge step backwards it was going to be. Bravo!

* Note that I mean "Microsoft-the-company" and not any individual within that bohemoth.